Monday, July 30, 2012

My Ultimate Teacher Binder

One thing I discovered last semester during my pre-internship was that I like having one big binder that I can put everything in, instead of individual notebooks or binders for each subject/class. I used and abused my binder last semester so bad that I knew I wanted a bigger one this year and I wanted it organized and not thrown together last minute (not that I did that last time ;) ) So after bunches and bunches of blog hopping and pinterest perusing, here is my little beauty!

The inside page with the quote is from The Curriculum Corner that had an amazing post with tons of free printables, including covers like the one above.

Ok so I guess the real purpose of the binder is for information and not just cute stuff (whatever), so I divided up my sections into: Important Information, Lesson Plans, Student Data, Course Information, Meeting Notes, Standards and Assessments, and Miscellaneous.

Those owls! Too much, right?! I used the templates I found here for the cover pages for each section. You can edit them in PowerPoint and use them for anything! New favorite resource. The font is called Good Dog and you can get it here.
For the important information section, I put the district schedule, a class schedule, our school's last accountability report, and anything else I'll need quickly!

Anything to make lesson plans more fun, right?

It's just begging for plans to be filled in

For my lesson plan section, I have a calendar template for each month I found at KindergartenWorks and you can write in the general idea of what you'll be focusing on each week/day. You can see her examples on her blog. This is also where I'll put finished written lesson plans and other guidelines for the curriculum.

For meeting notes, I printed out some copies of these meeting notes so I won't have to waste a notebook writing little notes here and there. It will also keep my excessive note taking to a minimum. Half page and you get cut off. Sorry. No more notes for you. Here are the rest of my section titles. I also put my internship manual in the back and my little personal planner in the front.

My Internship manual in the back of the binder.

The best part of something like this is that I can add and take stuff out throughout the year, which is great because I have a feeling some unexpected things will happen, just call it a hunch ;) Do you keep a binder? Or individual notebooks? Am I missing anything?? Hope all your pre-planning preparation is going well!!